Piecing the Story Together: Vladimir Petrov, the Press, and Whitehall’s White Paper
In 1953, the Soviet press continued to deny any connection between Burgess, Maclean, and the Soviet Union and claimed that their disappearance was being sensationalized by Western governments and media to stoke fears of Moscow (CDMB00013). But when KGB officer Vladimir Petrov defected in Australia in 1954, he revealed that the British diplomats were recruited as Soviet agents at Cambridge University twenty years earlier (CDMB00015). Revelations that Mrs. Maclean had aided and abetted her husband’s escape, and the search for an elusive “third man” in the UK Government who may have warned Maclean that he was about to be compromised captured the British “public imagination” (CDMB00016). Canadian diplomats noted that a White Paper by the UK Foreign Secretary did little to satisfy critics of the Whitehall and the Cabinet's handling of the Maclean and Burgess affair.
The White Paper rebuked the press corps and defended official “reticence” on the grounds that “espionage is carried out in secret. Counter-espionage equally depends for its success upon the maximum secrecy of its methods. Nor is it desirable at any moment to let the other side know how much has been discovered or guess at what means have been used to discover it…" Journalists had equal and opposite grievances. They wondered if the White Paper was intended to be a true public reckoning with the Burgess and Maclean affair, or crafted to present a narrative that would spare the British government any further embarrassment.